The present invention relates to a cooking apparatus for automatically preparing a food item prepared by putting various kinds of food stuffs into a shell or skin folded in half, and more particularly, a cooking apparatus for automatically preparing a taco.
A taco is prepared by folding a circular shell in half and putting food stuffs, such as cooked ground beef, shredded lettuce and cheese, into the shell. As the shell or skin, there are a soft type of shell called a tortilla, which is cooked by baking a flour or cornmeal mixed with liquid, and a hard type of shell called a taco shell, which is prepared by folding a shell after baking and frying the folded shell until it becomes hard. A taco using the tortilla is called a soft taco, and a taco using the taco shell is called a hard taco. Conventionally, preparation of these tacos has been done only manually. Namely, when a customer orders a taco, one sheet of a shell is taken out from a cabinet, and several kinds of food stuffs are put into the shell in order. Finally, the taco is wrapped up by a wrapping paper and handed out to the customer.
Preparation of a taco manually in the aforementioned way, however, has following problems;
(1) It takes time to put the food stuffs and to wrap the taco, so that at a peak hour, such as lunch time, customers have to wait for a long time. PA1 (2) An amount of the stuff varies individually. PA1 (3) Since the shredded cooking materials, such as lettuce and cheese, are scattered in the working space, it is not hygienic.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an automatic cooking apparatus so as to obviate the foregoing problems and to automatically prepare a food item prepared by putting various kinds of food stuffs into a shell folded in half, especially preparing a taco, so that labor cost can be saved.